She started in the exact place where Madison was lost, absorbing the area. She didn’t start a formal search. Instead she treated the area like an animal she was getting to know: feeling its body, understanding its form. This was a cold animal, an unpredictable animal, with jutting, mysterious, dangerous parts.
Just a few feet into the trees the road disappeared behind her, and if not for the compass in her pocket and the tracks behind her, Naomi might have lost all sense of direction. The tall firs wove a canopy above her, almost obliterating the sky. Here and there the sun slanted through the trees, sending shafts of light to the ground. She could see how easily it would be to get turned around, lost. She had read of people dying in this wilderness less than half a mile from a trail.
These were old-growth trees, and the snow-covered ground was surprisingly bare of brush. The snow was sculpted into patterns against the reddish tree trunks. The ground rose and fell around her—the child could have gone in practically endless directions, her form certain to disappear in mere moments.
Naomi always began by learning to love the world where the child went missing. It was like carefully unraveling a twisted ball of yarn. A bus stop that led to a driver that led to a basement room, carefully carpeted in soundproofing. A ditch in full flood that led to a river, where sadness awaited on the shore. Or, her most famous case, a boy gone missing eight years before, found in the school cafeteria where he had disappeared—only twenty feet below, where his captor, a night watchman, had built a secret basement lair in a supply room behind a defunct old boiler. It wasn’t until Naomi had pulled the original blueprints for the school that anyone knew the room existed.
Each missing place was a portal.
Deep into the forest the trees abruptly cleared, and Naomi was standing at the edge of a steep white ravine. At the bottom snow stared blankly back up at her. The land beyond rose into dizzying mountains. Far across the way a frozen waterfall resembled a charging lion. The trees were shrouded in white, a vision of the heavens.
It was March, she thought: still frozen up here.
Naomi imagined a five-year-old girl, lost and shivering, wandering in what must have seemed like an endless forest.
Madison Culver had been missing for three years. She would be eight years old by now—if she has survived.
On her way back down the mountain was a solitary store, so camouflaged with snow and moss she almost drove right past. It was built like a log cabin, with a ramshackle porch. strikes store, announced the faded hand-painted sign above the door.
The empty dirt parking lot was dusted with fresh snow. Naomi pulled in. She thought the store might be abandoned. But no, it was just unkempt. The door jangled behind her.
The windows were so dirty, it was perpetual dusk inside.
The old man behind the counter had a face covered in broken blue veins. His filthy cap looked glued to his sparse gray hair.
Naomi noted the dusty taxidermy heads behind him, the shells under the smeary glass counter. The aisles were set wide to accommodate snowshoes. Car parts were piled in corners; the metal shelves were packed with everything from cheap toys to dried macaroni to the manacled hands of animal traps.
It was the macaroni that caught her eye. Naomi was enough a student of life to recognize a subsistence store over a tourist stop on the road. She picked up a bag of stale nuts and a soda.
“Do people still live up here?” she asked, curiously.
The old man frowned suspiciously. It occurred to her it was a forest reserve. Possibly there were restrictions.
“Ay-um,” he said, sourly.
“How do they survive?”
He looked at her like she was an idiot. “Huntin’, trappin’.”
“That’s got to be cold work up here,” she said.
“Everything is cold work up here.”
He watched her leave, the door closing behind her.
She set up base in a small motel at the bottom of the forest range, the dead last place one could stay without pitching a tent—or digging an ice cave.
The motel had a seedy look about it. She was used to that. The lobby was crowded with frayed furniture. A group of ruddy-faced mountain climbers filled the small room, all gear and the smell of sweat.
Naomi was constantly amazed at all the little worlds that exist outside our own. Each case seemed to take her into a new land, with different cultures, heritages, and people. She had eaten fry bread on Indian reservations, spent weeks on an old slave plantation in the South, been lulled by New Orleans. But her favorite state was right here, home in prickly Oregon, where every turn of the road seemed to bring her to an entirely different vista.
On the counter was a plastic holder full of maps. She picked one up, paid for it as she checked in. In over eight years of investigations she had lost track of the number of hotel rooms.
She had started the work when she was twenty—unusually early, she knew, for an investigator. But, as she sometimes commented ruefully, she was called to it. In the beginning, working hand to mouth, Naomi had slept on the couches of the families that hired her, many of whom were too poor to pay a hotel bill. She learned eventually to charge by the case, and encouraged families to crowd-fund her efforts if needed. That way she made enough to at least afford a room.
It wasn’t the sleep she needed—she could sleep anywhere, even curled up in her car. It was the solitude. It was the chance to think.
There were over a thousand missing children reported each year in the States—a thousand ways to go missing. Many were parental kidnappings. Others were terrible accidents. Children died in abandoned freezers where they had gone to hide. They drowned in rock quarries, and got lost in the woods, just like Madison. Many were never found. About a hundred cases each year were known stranger abductions, though Naomi believed the real numbers were much higher. The abductions were her most publicized cases, but she took any missing child.
Naomi unfolded the map on the bed—and unfolded, and unfolded.
She located the spot Madison went missing and drew a tiny circle there—a circle in a sea of endless green. Her fingers traced the nearby roads, like spiders, found the distances between them too large to contemplate.
Where are you, Madison Culver? Flying with the angels, a silver speck on a wing? Are you dreaming, buried under the snow? Or is it possible, after three years missing, you are still alive?
That night she had supper in the diner adjacent to the motel, her eyes soaking up the locals: beefy men in lumber shirts, women made up with rainbow-sparkled eyes, a group of ornery-looking hunters. The waitress poured another cup of coffee, called her hon.
Naomi checked her cell phone. Now that she was back in Oregon she should stop by her room at her friend Diane’s house. And more importantly she should call Jerome, find time to visit him and Mrs. Cottle—the only family she could remember. It had been too long.
With the same mixture of fear and longing she always had, she thought of Jerome standing outside the farmhouse. Their last conversation had danced awfully close to something she was not prepared to confront. She put her cell phone away. She would call later.
Instead she scraped her plate—chicken-fried steak, corn, potatoes—and graciously accepted the offer of pie from the waitress.
In her dreams that night the children she had found lined up, filling an army. Just as she woke up she heard herself whispering, “Take over the world.”